Online publishing - A bad impression

For years, online publishers have priced their advertising inventory by thousands of impressions (CPM) and provided CPM as the major metric their advertisers can use to benchmark digital advertising campaigns.

But this approach does not give advertisers a transparent view of the value of their digital advertising, nor is it an ideal way for publishers to price inventory.

Impressions are meaningless

We believe that impressions are a largely meaningless metric for advertisers. They do not tell advertisers anything about the benchmarks they should really care about: How many unique people are seeing the advert and who are they? How often are they exposed to the advert? And what share of voice is the advertiser getting from a campaign?

Another problem with impressions lies in the fact that they can easily be manipulated through techniques aimed at multiplying page-views without improving a publisher's audience or the audience's visit duration. Impressions are not proportional to reach and frequency, measures that should be familiar to advertisers.

Multiple advertisers will often be jostling for a user's attention on a web page, so should you be paying the same CPM rate when you're one of four advertisers on a page as you would if you were the only one?

Unique users

Against this backdrop, digital publishers should start moving towards a model where they report more accurately on unique users and provide detailed information about the true reach and frequency numbers they offer advertisers.

Online media planners and brands, meanwhile, should apply the same fundamentals to digital as they do to other channels. They should look carefully at reach, frequency and campaign length when they purchase digital advertising inventory.

The concept of impressions still has its place in network buys and other low-value placements, but we believe that advertisers should start to move away from it in their more strategic campaigns. They should be looking at how they craft content and environment that are conducive to the conversations they want to have with their audiences, and then look at its value using many of the same metrics they'd apply in traditional media.

About Pierre Cassuto

Business development manager at Kagiso Media
Pierre Cassuto looks after growing the Kagiso New Media business via innovation, strategic initiatives and partnerships. Relatively new to the world of publishing, he gained extensive experience in both marketing and advertising while working for Ogilvy in Paris and then Johannesburg. He helped TV, digital and film production company, Both Worlds, launch ZANews, now SA's most awarded online comedy show. Cassuto holds a Bachelor of Business Science from the University of Cape Town.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This Message Board accepts no liability of legal consequences that arise from the Message Boards (e.g. defamation, slander, or other such crimes). All posted messages are the sole property of their respective authors. The maintainer does retain the right to remove any message posts for whatever reasons. People that post messages to this forum are not to libel/slander nor in any other way depict a company, entity, individual(s), or service in a false light; should they do so, the legal consequences are theirs alone. Bizcommunity.com will disclose authors' IP addresses to authorities if compelled to do so by a court of law.

Not all online advertising campaigns use CTR as a measure of success. Dominate premium placements deliver reach and awareness incredibly successfully. These premium solutions should always be included as the lead execution in any meaningful campaign. Once reach is achieved frequency is vitally important. Very few publishers are able to deliver both in SA, for example it takes 8 exposures, on average, to entice a potential car buyer to register for a test drive. The top 20 Effective Measure tagged sites, report an average of 2-3 visits per unique browser monthly. In order for premium publisher to deliver a frequency of 8, the untargeted impressions would potentially cost the marketer a small fortune. With smart retargeting technology premium publishers are able to deliver a series of creative messages to a specific user, this results in decreased impression wastage and improves the yield. The best combinations are often dominate large format premium execution supported by native content marketing placements. These content solutions entrench the brands value proposition with users. To drive frequency and finally conversion either consider a retarget campaign from your premium publishers if this isn’t possible a cost effective well positioned always-on placement should do the trick.

Interesting and I can largely agree. However, what you say is dependent on the publisher and the understanding the publisher and/or agent has of the site and also the understanding of what the client need is. There are technical attributes to what you are mentioning, all which can be, and is done through ad serving. If you are talking about tracking individuals and gathering personal information from them online, then thats a different legal story all together. Either way, good viewpoint and eye opener for those that need it.